When the ancient Polynesians invented surfing, they often used a paddle to help them navigate. Fast-forward a few millennia, and Stand-Up Paddleboarding, or SUP, finds itself trendy again. Part of its increasing popularity is that standing upright allows surfers to spot waves more easily and thus catch more of them, multiplying the fun factor. Paddling back to the wave becomes less of a strain as well. The ability to cruise along on flat inland water, surveying the sights, is another advantage. Finally, its a good core workout. If youre sold on the idea, schedule an intro SUP lesson, free with board and paddle rental, and you may find yourself riding the waves like a Polynesian king.More

Many of us remember coming home from our elementary schools with freshly glazed pinchpots, cups, or whatever else our young imaginations could conjure up. Saturday mornings at the Randall Museum can bring that memory back, or create a new one for the youngsters. Ceramics make great gifts — especially on Mothers' and Fathers' Day. Hop on board for the Randall's once-weekly class, and for $6 and two weeks to have your work fired and glazed, you'll have all the materials you need.More

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When employees at a store asks if they can help you find anything, it's usually a meaningless gesture, or at worst, a threat of surveillance, but when Dick Vivian asks you what you're looking for when you walk into Rooky Ricardo's Records, he wants to help you find the funkiest, silkiest tunes he has — of which he has a lot.

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San Francisco Film Society held their Film Society Awards Night at Bimbo's on Tuesday, May 7th. Harrison Ford was in attendance accepting the 2013 Peter J. Owens Award. Photographs by Josh Edelson for SF Weekly.

Lars von Trier's Antichrist can't save this year's Cannes

CANNES, France — It's been a blood-soaked first week at the
Cannes Film Festival — at least onscreen.

Six festivals ago, Lars von Trier galvanized a mediocre competition
with his coup de cinéma, Dogville. Returning this year,
again in the midst of an uninspired field, von Trier has managed to
raise the stakes — for onscreen cruelty, that is.

Opening with the joke "Lars von Trier Antichrist" and closing
with a punchline dedication to cinesaint Andrei Tarkovsky, the Danish
stuntmeister's latest recounts the gruesome ordeal of a bereaved couple
(suitably anguished Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg), who, having
lost their toddler because they were too sexually engrossed to notice
him climbing out the window, retreat to the woodland cabin they call
Eden. He's a smug psychotherapist; she's borderline psychotic, consumed
with guilt. Rather than finding solace, they wind up destroying each
other, along with a chunk of von Trier's reputation.

Dogville hit a home run; Antichrist takes a big swing
and scratches out an infield single. Fearsomely ambitious, the movie
resembles Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage, in its nightmare
conjugal claustrophobia, and Kubrick's The Shining, in its
foredoomed attempt to be the scariest movie ever made. Literal
hallucinations seem clumsy and gratuitous; von Trier not only
terrorizes the audience with the death of a child and the spectacle of
mental disintegration, but with torture, castration, extreme
self-mutilation, and supernatural bad vibes.

Asked to "justify" his movie at a mildly adversarial press
conference, von Trier declined: "You are all my guests — that's
how I feel — not the other way around," blandly adding, "I am the
best filmmaker in the world." Be that as it may, von Trier's outrageous
Kammerspiel does succeed in its visceral one-upmanship —
no small accomplishment in a festival that has already offered up a
prolonged and graphic rape-murder-dismemberment (Brillante Mendoza's
Kinatay), Ivan the Terrible feeding his enemies to a giant bear
(Pavel Lungin's Tsar), and a ravenous vampire using a corkscrew
to open up his victim's jugular (Park Chan-wook's Thirst).

Von Trier and the festival's standout, Police, Adjective,
notwithstanding, the energy has so far come mainly from Asia. Chinese,
Filipino, Iranian, Japanese, and South Korean movies have stoked the
most anticipation and inspired the most heat. Both the Competition and
Un Certain Regard gave prime early slots to movies that, as
taboo-breaking as they are, were shot on the QT and are unshowable in
their homelands — China and Iran.

For all its graphic sex — gay and straight — and blunt
depiction of youthful anomie (as well as suicide and attempted murder),
Lou Ye's disorganized Spring Fever proved a major
disappointment. Had the film been made in 1980s Germany, it would have
seemed the work of a confused Fassbinder wannabe. Indeed, The
Hollywood Reporter's knowledgeable Maggie Lee called it a "tame
shadow of China's cult queer auteur Cui Zi'en." Bahman Ghobadi's UCR
opener, Nobody Knows About the Persian Cats, was also loosely
structured, but, at the very least, this quasi rock-doc has an insider
feel. Iran's leading Kurdish filmmaker and all-round purveyor of
musical ethnofunk brings his shtick to town in this survey of Tehran
basement bands — including rap, metal, indie prog, and any
ensemble in which a woman sings lead. That the movie was co-written by
Ghobadi's fiancée, the recently released Roxana Saberi, gave
this out-front attack on cultural repression additional street
cred.

Perhaps Asian auteurs remember an indigenous popular cinema, or
perhaps they are working for an international audience. In either case,
their movies have drawn heavily on genre: Prolific Hong Kong actioner
Johnnie To's soulful hitman thriller Vengeance; South Korean
über-director Park's baroque bloodsucker Thirst; and
Filipino miserablist Mendoza's far more horrifying crime exposé
Kinatay are all in competition, with South Korean Bong "The
Host" Joon-ho's murder-mystery Mother and Japanese
sentimentalist Hirokazu Kore-eda's manga romance Air Doll both
in UCR.

As elemental as its title, Vengeance — which boasts
ravaged French icon Johnny Hallyday and a nifty amnesia twist —
is the sort of movie one would have felt privileged to discover on 42nd
Street back in the day. Still, UCR genre flicks have an edge on the
competition's, at least in terms of confounding expectation.
Mother starts as a cartoonish, almost slapstick comedy about a
village idiot and his doting parent (ferociously played by South
Korea's televisual embodiment of mature maternity, Kim Hye-ja); turns
glum and hectoring when the 27-year-old child is railroaded into prison
for a local murder; then, in its last third, begins to twist and turn
into a chilling psychological drama.

More problematic in its meandering structure, and yet occasionally
sublime, Kore-eda's Air Doll is a Hoffmanesque fairy tale, in
which an inflatable sex partner (delightfully played by Korean actress
Bae Du-na, the sister in The Host) comes to life and, while her
owner is at work, begins to explore her environs — an old quarter
of Tokyo — finding work and, in one unforgettable bit of
business, love in the local video store. (Even this sweetest of movies
features a bloody, if unintentional, sex murder.)

At once sentimental and perverse, Air Doll is a highly
resonant offering from the land of Bunraku puppets and pink movies,
Mariko Mori and Hello Kitty. One can only imagine how much fun it would
have been in 3-D, like Cannes' dearly loved opening-night movie
Up, or as directed by a hard-boiled East European black humorist
like Jan Svankmajer. There has been, so far as I've seen, only one such
movie in Cannes' official sections, the pride of UCR, Romanian
filmmaker Corneliu Porumboiu's Police, Adjective.

Porumboiu, who won the 2006 Camera d'Or for his first film, 12:08
East of Bucharest, has confounded the sophomore jinx with an
absurdist comedy that is even drier, deeper, and more closely observed
than his estimable debut. Observation is the key word. Police,
Adjective focuses almost entirely upon the banal details of a
particular case: Three high school kids have been seen smoking hash. A
young detective watches them, files reports on what he and we see, and
decides that the crime is too minor an infraction to warrant
prosecution and the severe punishment that the law demands.

Predicated on a series of routines and staged for maximum
objectivity, Police, Adjective has something of the deadpan
theatricality that characterized early Jim Jarmusch. But the movie is
also a deadly serious analysis of bureaucratic procedure and
particularly (as presaged by the lengthy analysis of a pop song's
lyrics and grammar put forth by the cop's schoolteacher wife), the
tyranny of language.

Police, Adjective is the least violent movie I've seen at
Cannes, but nothing has been more disturbing than the movie's final
scene, in which the cop's superior uses a dictionary and a blackboard
to parse the meanings of "conscience" and "police." Images may record
reality; words define it.

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